Stocking-stuffer art? Pictures that fit neatly in a suitcase? No doubt some art-world folks would cringe at the thought of paintings marketed as petite, portable and packable for holiday gift giving.

But others may recall how Olga Hirshhorn furnished her 500-square-foot "Mouse House" in Washington, D.C., with hundreds of artifacts and small artworks given to her by the world-famous artists she and her late husband, Joseph Hirshhorn, collected. A selection of those objects has been on display at the Naples Museum of Art for the past several years.

It's probably safe to say that Naples artist and gallery owner Natalie Guess falls in the second camp.

"It's all made with loving care and looking for a good home," she said recently, looking at her gallery walls. Guess and her husband, painter Phil Fisher, have taken on the role of Santa's artful helpers for the second year in a row with an exhibit of small-scale art called "Miniature Yet Monumental."

This celebration of small proportions is on view through Dec. 31 at the Guess-Fisher gallery and frame shop near the City Dock. All of the artworks measure no more than 12 square inches. Created by 20 Southwest Florida artists, the tiny temptations range from paintings and drawings to fiber art and mixed-media works.

The wee artworks have correspondingly slender price tags, ranging in price from $100 to $650. Several marine paintings by local stalwart Jerry Vallez, who died in September at age 87, have already sailed off the walls.

Fisher, who is known for his impressionistic scenes of Naples beaches, has contributed several tiny, breezy watercolors to the show. Guess, a batik artist, has included a few of her stylized images of tropical birds, painted on cotton with colored dyes.

Several artists in the show readily embrace the charm factor that comes with small size. Bonny Hawley discovered a trove of diminutive frames and paints pictures to go inside them. Her "Power of Prayer" sets an image of a Renaissance-era woman with clasped hands inside a tiny altarpiece. In its own small way, it evokes the much larger, grander altarpieces artists painted hundreds of years ago for European churches.

Sam Platt, who teaches drawing at the Naples Art Association's von Liebig Art Center, has two small-scale paintings of pandas at Guess-Fisher that express the outsized cuteness of the fuzzy black-and-white creatures.

Platt's work is also available at the von Liebig gift shop and directly from him, with paintings and works on paper starting at $100. He is an "observationalist" — a representational painter with a keen eye for human misbehavior as well as a love of nature.

"I'm fascinated by stone and trees," he said recently. "With the trees, what really grabs me is the wood — the way it grows and the textures of it. And I miss the stone I used to see up north."

Many other area artists besides those in the Guess-Fisher show have a selection of small-scale artworks available that lend themselves to holiday giving. Their works uniquely — and sometimes eccentrically — communicate the "spirit of place" found in Southwest Florida.

"I try to express the mysteriousness that the Everglades have to me," fiber artist Leigh Herndon said of her poetic wax-resist paintings on silk, some of which come in small sizes. "There's an ethereal quality about the Everglades that I was hoping to capture."

Herndon, who also makes dyed-silk scarves and garments, explored the painterly aspects of her medium when she began making her "Everglades Series" earlier this year, inspired by swamp walks and kayaking trips.

"Japanese wax-resist textiles come out of a painting tradition," she noted, "and you want to be able to shade and blend colors."

She practices a set of techniques known in Japanese as "rozome." They are related to batik in that they involve using melted wax to block out areas of fabric that will resist dyes and remain a particular color as a piece of cloth is repeatedly bathed in vats of different hues. Rozome involves the use of brushes to create gradations of color and varied thickness of lines in the composition. Herndon uses the techniques to create textiles that are more pictorial rather than decoratively patterned. Her smallest paintings in the series are just more than 14 square inches, framed and ready to hang, for $325 each.

Painter Andy Browne has several 6-square-inch monoprints and mixed-media works on paper available for $125 each. Her art typically delves into the life force of nature, which in her view is not always benevolent.

She steps into her garden for inspiration, sometimes finding things of beauty and other times discovering that high anxiety reigns amid the leaves and flowers.

"An overriding realization that nature is not a benign environment has dictated my sense of landscape. There is nothing timid about the outdoors — not much is peaceful or relaxed," Browne said in her artist statement.

"Rather than soft sunsets, I tend to see the environment as awe-inspiring, wonderful and beautiful, but also basically hostile. Humankind should not feel in charge or secure. Nature is not a nice place. It's survival of the fittest and eat or be eaten," Browne said.

Her small-scale works, however, tend to focus on the intricate beauty of nature's bounty, such as the soft shapes of orchid petals or bird's feathers. Informed by an ecological consciousness, these works are delicate and serene rather than red in tooth and claw.

For the music lover on your list, Tammra Sigler's pen-and-ink drawings of musicians and dancers performing at the Naples Philharmonic might make a welcome gift. Unframed, they cost $250 each. The drawings may be tiny, but they're turbocharged with energy.

An expressionistic painter who divides her time between Naples and Baltimore, Sigler sketches avidly while she attends concerts. Her drawings are loose and spontaneous, responding to the performer's movements and musical rhythms.

She also has a large selection of lusciously colored 9-square-inch monoprints of flowers, food and toys that sell for $800 unframed.

Of course, the slippery slope of holiday shopping applies to art as much as it does to any other category of stuff we covet. Why not get one for yourself while you're at it?

"One of the great things about purchasing small works is that you can pick up a small sample at a reasonable price," Guess said. If there's an artist whose work you've always wanted to collect, going small could be the start of something big.